In September of 2006, 23 year-old Polish student Angelika Kluk, was reported missing by her boyfriend; a few days later her body was found stuffed through a trap door inside the grounds of St Patrick's Roman Catholic Church, in the Anderston area of Glasgow.
Police began the search for the last man Kluk had been seen with that afternoon, which was the church handyman, Patrick McLaughlin, but when his image was shared with the media, the police received a surprising bit of information - an old neighbour recognised his image and contacted the police:
The man in the image wasn’t Patrick Mclaughlin, it was Peter Tobin. A man who would become one of the most prolific serial killers in Scottish history.
Peter Tobin's Early Life
For almost two decades, Peter Tobin unleashed a reign of terror along the length of the UK country, his prey - lone women, young girls, even his own partners. From a childhood steeped in violence, Tobin’s warped, sadistic tendencies escalated from serious domestic abuse to depraved sexual attacks, and murder.
Peter Tobin was born on 27th August 1946 in Johnstone, which is around 12 miles west of Glasgow in Scotland, to parents Daniel and Marjorie Tobin. There isn’t a lot of information surrounding his childhood, but it is known that his father worked as an engineer, and his mother stayed at home to take care of her children. Tobin was the youngest of eight children, and has been described as a child who, from a very early age, showed ”very little remorse or emotion” when he would get into trouble, or cause it.
Life for Tobin in the late 1940s was somewhat typical; he would spend a lot of his time playing outdoors with the other neighborhood kids, despite Tobin struggling to make friends, but any group Tobin would mix with would end up causing trouble. Tobin’s siblings didn’t seem to have difficulty socializing, but Tobin was teased by the other children for his small frame and his tendency to let his anger get the better of him; causing trouble wasn’t just limited to the neighborhood, Tobin was also acted out at home, and would often receive beatings from his father, and mother.
Tobin would smash furniture, fight with his siblings, throw rocks, and kick stray cats and dogs; due to his behaviour, and the complaints from his neighbors, teachers, even his own brothers and sisters, his parents made the decision the send him to a “reform school” specifically for children with emotional and/or behavioral problems. These types of schools were not quite as regimented as a juvenile facility -Tobin would consistently get into fights and flee the school, he was caned or “strapped” with a belt on numerous occasions, but his behaviour would always remain the same.
The school was able to serve him a basic education, and he was introduced to hands-on work such as woodwork, metal work, and gardening. There again isn’t much information available about Tobin’s teenage years, but after he left school he returned home only to be quickly placed into a young offenders institute - his behaviour still consisted as aggressive and disruptive, including serving time for an undisclosed petty crime. Tobin was able to work a few cash-in-hand jobs, and saved up for a motorcycle which he would ride up and down the length of the country.
Tobin, without a steady home, would sleep rough, stay in hostels and shelters all across the UK; he rarely returned to see his family as he felt abandoned by them. Due to his reputation, and his behavioral issues, Tobin wasn’t able to hold down a job for too long; at one point he applied to become an infantryman for the French Foreign Legion, but it is unsure whether he was rejected, or if he deserted them after enrolling.
The stories of Tobin’s life after this become quite blurred, but it is known that Tobin began creating himself many aliases - one of these aliases would land him a job as a trainee Chef in 1967 in Glasgow city centre. His colleagues would describe him as “friendly and charming” but they would also say he had a bad temper, especially if something wasn't going his way in the kitchen. It seems like Tobin could have enjoyed this role as he threw himself into it, pulling double shifts over 6 days. On his one day off a week Tobin would frequent a club called the Barrowlands.
Tobin was a keen dancer, and would frequent the club with a selection of his work colleagues; they would describe how he would try to make one drink last him all night, so he could spend his money buying drinks for women he met on the dancefloor. The mixture of his charming, and friendly side, along with his drinking plan, led him to meet 17 year old Margaret.
A Monster Emerges
Vicki Hamilton via Find A Grave
Photo Credit: Find A GraveMargaret Mountry worked as a receptionist, and quickly fell for 22-year-old Tobin due to his confidence and charm. Their relationship seemed strong, with the pair quickly hitting it off; Tobin would take her on motorbike rides through the countryside, and even introduced her to his now frail parents, despite their fractured relationship.
In 1969, Tobin decided to spend time in southern England, but it isn’t entirely documented why. Margaret agreed to move with him to Brighton shortly after this move, and the pair got married shortly after.
It is not long after the wedding that the true, horrific nature of Tobin’s person begins to emerge.
The pair would constantly argue into the early hours of the morning, much to the dismay of their neighbors, along with violent fights that could be heard through the walls. On one occasion, Tobin locked Margaret in the flat whilst he went to work, and there was also chatter of physical violence, including sexual assault.
The relationship took a sharp, dark turn when Margaret left the flat one evening to head to the local shop, and due to her absence, her puppy became distressed. Margaret returned a little later and walked into a horror scene - the living room was covered in blood, and a screaming Tobin stood with a bloodied knife in his hand. “It wouldn’t stop yelping!” he bellowed. Tobin had stabbed the puppy to death, decapitated it, and threw it out of the window.
Tobin, after brutally killing a distressed, innocent puppy, turned his violence onto Margaret; he proceeded to sexually assault her with the knife, which caused severe bleeding, so much so that her blood began to drip through the ceiling into their downstairs neighbors.
Tobin was able to convince them it was animal blood, spinning a story that another dog had attacked their puppy. Margaret was hospitalized for several weeks, and the attack had left her unable to have children.
In the 1970s, Tobin was arrested and charged with forgery and burglary, and was sentenced to 5 years in prison at HMP Barlinnie in Glasgow. Margaret uses this to her advantage and files for divorce, before fleeing back to her family.
Tobin was released after just three years and threatened to kill Margaret if she ever revealed the truth.
After Tobin was released from prison, he moved back to his house in Brighton, which he kept as a base for next 20 years; he married for a second time to a 30-year-old nurse, Sylvia Jefferies. This marriage lasted for a little while longer than his first, and they welcomed a son, Ian, but two years later their second-born died shortly after birth due to breathing issues.
Despite Tobin now having a child, his evil side emerged once again, and he subjected Sylvia to horrific violence, some of which was with their son in the room.
The violence consisted of Tobin choking her during sex, but each time would become more aggressive, with one occasion causing her to lose consciousness; on another occasion, Tobin refused to let go of her neck until their son walked in.
Sylvia eventually left Tobin after three years of terror, with her son, Ian, and stayed in a Women's Refuge before filing for divorce.
In 1986, 10 years after his second marriage, Tobin is now 40 years old, and he meets 16-year-old Cathy Wilson who he asks to move in with him pretty sharply. Cathy became pregnant the following year and gave birth to a son, Daniel; Tobin and Cathy wed in 1989.
For reasons not completely known, Tobin quickly uproots his family from Brighton to Bathgate town in West Lothian, Scotland, and Cathy would stay with him for eight months as she secretly saved up enough money for her to flee with her son back to England.
Cathy also reported sexual violence at the hands of Tobin; he would threaten to throw their baby down the stairs if she ever left him, he would constantly strangle her, and when she went into labour, he refused to take her to hthe ospital until she cooked him and his friends a roast dinner.
Cathy got away from Tobin, but he eventually tracked her down to Portsmouth and decided to move to Kent to be closer to his son.
More of Peter Tobin's Victims
On the 10th February 1991, a 15-year-old girl named Vicki Hamilton became lost as she waited for a bus ride to her parents' house after spending the weekend with her sister.
Vicki grabbed a bag of chips from a local fish and chip shop, but as she had wandered too far from the bus stop, she proceeded to approach people on the street to ask for directions. It’s not certain whether one of the people she stopped to ask was Tobin, or whether he had spotted her, and approached her, but Vicki did find her way back to the bus stop, but she never caught her bus; all that was left at the scene was her dropped purse.
The case of missing Vicki Hamilton became one of the largest missing person cases Scotland had ever seen.
Peter Tobin had abducted Vicki Hamilton; he raped, tortured, and murdered her at his empty home in Margate, which was only just over a mile away from the bus stop. Tobin cut her body in half and wrapped each part in bin liners. He then drove her mutilated corpse to his rented accommodation in Kent, over 470 miles in England.
He waited until the early hours of the morning before burying her body in the garden.
Dinah Nicole via Find A Grave
Photo Credit: Find A GraveA few months later, in August 1991, Tobin approached two hitchhikers, a male and a female; both were hitchhiking home after attending a music festival. The pair were happy to receive a lift from Tobin.
It’s speculated that he had his baby son with him, so to them, he just looked like a normal family man. The male hitchhiker was dropped off along the M25, whereas the female hitchhiker, 18-year-old Dinah McNicol, was to be dropped off several miles further away, but Dinah was never seen alive again.
Dinah’s family, whilst also dealing with their missing child, were notified that large withdrawals were being made from her bank savings account, an account she was very vocal about as it was to find her future travels.
A neighbour saw Tobin at his Kent home digging a hole in the garden, and even made remark about how deep Tobin was digging, but Tobin told him he was digging a sand pit for his son. The neighbour remarked further, as the depth of the hole seemed incredibly deep for a sand pit, and Tobin quite sharply told the neighbour to stop the conversation about the hole.
Tobin did create a sand pit for his son, and under it he buried both Vicki Hamilton and Dinah McNicol.
In 1993, it seemed that his relationship with his third ex-wife, Cathy, had reached a somewhat amicable arrangement after he moved to be closer to his son. One evening, as it approached Daniel's 5th birthday, Cathy allowed Tobin to have Daniel at his flat. As he watched TV with his 4-year-old son, someone knocked at the door.
Two 14-year-old girls stood in his doorway and asked if they could wait in his flat whilst they waited for his neighbour, due to the pouring rain; Tobin said yes and walked the girls into his living room. Tobin went into the kitchen and returned with a knife.
He then proceeded to force the girls to drink from a bottle of vodka at knifepoint before tying them up; he then proceeded to rape both girls, and even stabbed one of them in the shoulder as they attempted to escape. Tobin did all of this in front of son, telling him they were all just playing a game.
After the violent ordeal, Tobin calls Cathy and tells her to come and pick Daniel up as he was feeling unwell; she drives to his flat where Tobin meets her outside and hands Daniel over, all whilst the young girls are still in the living room.
Tobin returns to his flat and switches the gas stove on, hoping to kill the girls via carbon monoxide poisoning. Tobin then flees to Coventry and goes into hiding by joining the Jesus Fellowship under a false name; however, both girls survive the attack.
Tobin was tracked down as his Blue Austin Metro was spotted outside a church. He was immediately arrested and sentenced to 14 years in prison. He served 10 of these years before once again returning to Scotland, but the question on many people’s lips was: where is Peter Tobin now?
Nobody knew - he fled without telling the police of any change of address or relocation.
Tobin's Final Murder
Angelika Kluk via Find A Grave
Photo Credit: Find A GraveFast-forward to September 2006, 23-year-old Polish student Angelika Kluk was working and living at Sts Patrick's Church in Glasgow as a part-time cleaner, in order to support her studies and her family back in Poland.
Angelika thought she’d found safety having been given a room in the clergy house. She believed working at St. Patrick’s Church would help her learn English, earn a wage, and live securely, but the sanctuary she counted on was anything but safe.
Everyone, including Angelika, knew Pat McLaughlin as a friendly, soft-spoken handyman who worked for the church, too. But beneath that gentle façade lurked the real monster: Peter Tobin.
On the night of September 24, 2006, Angelika was last seen inside a garage next to the church where the pair were painting a shed together, but as they painted, he unleashed a brutal attack. Angelica was bludgeoned with a wooden table leg, before having her hands cable tied; she was then placed onto a plastic sheet before being dragged into the church.
"Pat" raped and stabbed her sixteen times, before stuffing her dying body into a hidden crawlspace beneath the church, accessed through a narrow trap door.
Angelika was reported missing by her boyfriend, and a massive missing persons investigation began, but her body was found three days later in the crawl space under the church. Staff were questioned, but Pat had vanished.
Inside the church garage, a newly built garden shed was found to have blood spatter on it, along with a wooden table leg that matched Angelika’s. Semen was also found on the fly of her jeans, and a DNA sample produced a name.
The handyman, Pat, had his image shared to the media, but a former neighbor immediately recognized Pat as Peter Tobin. As a nationwide alert went out, so did a new investigative effort: Operation Anagram.
Tobin was found just two days later at a London hospital, admitted under yet another alias, “James Kelly.” When an officer approached to confirm his identity, Tobin snapped back, “I believe you’ve been looking for me.”
Is Peter Tobin Still Alive?
Operation Anagram quickly grew into a sweeping investigation - detectives chased over a thousand leads, tracked more than forty former addresses, and linked Tobin to at least thirty-eight SIM cards and up to forty aliases.
A former Tobin home in Bathgate yielded a blood-stained dagger and jewelry in the attic, just over a mile from where Vicky Hamilton had been abducted. Investigators then searched his next address, 50 Irvine Drive in Margate, and a neighbor remembered Tobin digging a huge “sand pit” for his son. An excavation of the garden uncovered two bodies: 15-year-old Vicky and 18-year-old Dinah, buried only meters apart.
Over the next two and a half years, separate trials unfolded but they were repeatedly delayed by Tobin’s health issues or newly uncovered evidence. He was ultimately convicted of all three murders and given three life sentences, which were later upgraded to a whole-life order in 2009.
The judge said:
“You stand convicted of the truly evil abduction and murder of a vulnerable young girl… Yet again, you’ve shown yourself unfit to live in a decent society.”
During one of Tobin’s trials, another shock surfaced - Reverend Gerry Nann, 63, admitted he had been in a sexual affair with Angelika just weeks before her murder, inside the same church where she was later buried. After the revelation, multiple women and girls accused Nann of abuse.
He died three years later, reportedly of a heart attack.
In prison, Tobin’s health deteriorated. He suffered chest pains in 2012, survived a razor-blade attack by a cellmate in 2015, had a stroke in 2016, and was diagnosed with cancer in 2019.
Is Peter Tobin still alive? No, he died on October 8, 2022, in agony and chained to a hospital bed, still denying victims’ families the truth about his crimes.
No relatives claimed his body, and his ashes were scattered at sea eight days later.
How Many People Did Peter Tobin Kill?
Police sealed his prison cell and preserved his belongings, clothes, toiletries, jewelry, and books, hoping they might still hold clues to other victims, and as of 2024, investigators continue reviewing them.
A 2012 dossier revealed Tobin had once worked briefly as a school caretaker and had visited children’s hospitals at least 65 times between the ages of 23 and 60. Operation Anagram initially linked him to 90 missing people but narrowed it to nine.
How many people did Peter Tobin kill?
Tobin himself claimed he had killed 48 women, though he took whatever truths he held to the grave, never offering details or ever acknowledging more than the three murders he was convicted of.
